Mark Bernstein recently wrote that even a posting about a cheese sandwich might well be worth reading, as well as writing. But I hardly ever eat cheese sandwiches, so I haven’t even had that as an impetus to write lately.

I guess the last cheese sandwich which made an impression on me was a long time ago, on a trip to Washington, DC, with my cousins. We made the mistake of stopping at a place called the “Virginia Inn” somewhere around Ashland. I was probably 12 at the time, but I still vividly remember the so-called grilled cheese sandwich that they inflicted on me — it was cold and greasy, completely inedible, and I’m pretty sure it cost upwards of a dollar (and that was back when a dollar bought something). And it took forever for them to deliver it, too. The place has since gone out of business, and rightly so.

This blog hasn’t gone out of business, though I have been awfully quiet lately; I’ve thought about posting, but never when I’ve been near my computer with time enough to write something. I’ve been trying to do Technical Stuff at work (of late, my most effective programming tool has been PowerPoint, and that’s a sad state of affairs for someone whose title is “Distinguished Engineer”), and, as is always the case, programming tasks expand to fill all available time and mental capacity.

And I’ve been reading books at home rather than sitting on the computer till all hours; I decided it was time to work on some of the backlog which I’d picked up at Worldcon last August — perhaps after I finish those books, I’ll find the piles buried elsewhere in the house from previous years. So four of the last five books I’ve read were old SF:

Age of Miracles by John Brunner — not one of his best by any means; the characters were almost as cardboardy as typical Asimov, and the ideas weren’t nearly as enticing

The Jagged Orbit, again by Brunner — this was far better, although not as good as Stand on Zanzibar or The Shockwave Rider. The dystopian future Brunner conjectures here, with the US becoming a very segregated and heavily armed society, did not come to pass — but it sure resembles the descriptions of Iraq in the news this week.

Rogue Star by Frederick Pohl and Jack Williamson — perhaps this book would have made more sense if I’d read the first two books of the Starchild Trilogy before reading this one. But I doubt it.

Jack of Eagles by James Blish — this was my favorite of this batch, a fast-moving tale of one man’s discovery of his psi powers, a conspiracy aimed at world domination, and how he triumphed. The copy I bought was a UK edition, printed in 1975 (and, interestingly, sans copyright notice), but the book was clearly set in an earlier era — the protagonist was going to be evicted because a girl let herself into his apartment (stealing a passkey to do so), and by 1975, that would not have been very believable. A quick check on Amazon reveals that the book was actually written in 1952, which makes the setting much more understandable!

The other book I read recently was nonfiction; The Holy Thief by Rabbi Mark Borowitz. Borowitz started life as a nice Jewish boy in Cleveland, but after his father died at age 14, he went to hell (more-or-less literally), beginning a career as a criminal which sent him to prison twice. The second time, he realized that he was on a death trip, and turned back to Judaism , eventually becoming the rabbi at Beit T’Shuvah in Los Angeles. I almost literally could not put the book down and finished it in two sittings; Diane had a similar reaction. By coincidence, while we were reading the book, Jeff was in LA on a class trip from school, where they visited Beit T’Shuvah, although he didn’t get to meet Rabbi Borowitz. This book will be the Shir Hadash book group book for June — highly recommended.

The USER group in Computer Science at work has a weekly “Tea Time” gathering every Thursday afternoon, where people from the USER group and related areas gather for an hour or so of food and talk. I don’t know how long the gathering has been happening — I first heard of it when I joined Almaden Services Research in 2004 — but I’ve been a frequent attendee.

People take turns hosting, and so the cuisine varies, although it’s very rarely nutritious — or, to put it more directly, people like to bring dessert. Today, a colleague and I split the hosting duties, trying two approaches to chocolate cake.

Hers was a variation on Gourmet’s Double Chocolate Layer Cake, using a cream cheese frosting for a contrast. I made the Simple Chocolate Sheet Cake that Al suggested, as I’d done for Diane’s birthday last year, although this time I remembered to put the vanilla in the frosting.

There was a definite contrast between the cakes. Her cake was much more complex and subtle, with many flavors and an elegant presentation (she even brought it in a box). My cake had one, rather unsubtle message: chocolate!. It was very dark (and the frosting was even darker), and there were no distractions like cream cheese or strawberries. And it was still in the cake pan, because I didn’t have anything big enough to transport it in.

We had thought about taking a poll to see which cake people preferred, but didn’t get around to it — both cakes vanished, with people going for seconds of both, so I guess we both won.

When Diane came home this afternoon, she found a mysterious potted plant on our doorstep.

There was no note, and no indication of who left the plant or why. The best guess we have is that it might be related to the March of Dimes mailing which arrived today from one of our neighbors; at any rate, the card in that mailing had flowers on it.

Or maybe it was a SuperBowl party thank you.

Whatever the reason, it was certainly one of the nicer things we could find on our doorstep!

Yesterday, we went to San Jose Rep to see The Immigrant, a play about the experience of a Russian Jewish immigrant in Hamilton, Texas, where he started as a fruit peddler and ended up as a respected member of the community (and the only Jew in town), owner of the local department store. I wonder how similar his story was to that of my grandfather, who was a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant and eventually owned a grocery store. Even without that connection, I would recommend the play.

Today, we hosted our annual Super Bowl party — as usual, we had more than enough food (most of it of dubious nutritional value, especially the stuff I picked out!), and far too much beer (one six-pack, untouched). The commercials didn’t seem to be up to the standard I expected of the Super Bowl; the best commercial, by far, was from FedEx. Other notable commercials included the ones from Hummer, Sierra Mist, and the Bud Light magic refrigerator commercial. But most of the commercials went in one eye and out the other — I’m glad I wasn’t paying for them.

The best news, though, is that my father-in-law is no longer homeless. He and his girlfriend moved into their apartment yesterday after their stuff arrived from Valley Stream — they were lucky to be able to lease an apartment in the complex they wanted (Fellowship Square in Tucson) with only a six-week wait. They’d been staying in hotels, with friends, and with family, but they said that moving from place to place every week or so was getting tiring, so I know that they’re happy to be firmly grounded again.

Thanks to Jason for pointing out the demise of Western Union’s telegram service on Friday.

I never sent any telegrams, though Diane had to send one to a Realtor when we were bidding on this house (she was in Florida at the time). Today, of course, she’d send a fax (even back then, faxes were almost available — somewhere in my files, I have a FedEx ZapMail receipt for some part of the paperwork we had to deal with). And we got at least one congratulatory telegram at our wedding. But I guess telegrams had already outlived their usefulness when Western Union started to deliver them by phone.

If there still were telegrams, though, I might have considered sending one today to mark Jeff’s 16th birthday. Happy birthday, Jeff!

One nice thing about the long plane and train rides on my trip to Finland was that it gave me time to read (especially on the flight home, when the power at my seat wasn’t working!). And the lack of English-language newspapers encouraged me to read the books that I’d brought with me instead of blowing my time on USA Today.

On the flight to Finland, I mostly read magazines I’d brought along to read and discard, as well as doing some reading in preparation for the session, but I did squeeze in one book, Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders, by John Mortimer. Since Leo Kern is no longer with us, I guess this will never be turned into a TV production, but I could hear him thundering in my head anyway, along with the rest of the cast (especially She Who Must Be Obeyed). This was a quick read, but definitely fun — recommended.

In Tampere, I found myself eating dinner alone most evenings (my IBM contact recommended I stay at the Tampere City Center, which was quite nice, but almost everyone else was at a slightly less-expensive hotel, the Cumulus, four long and cold blocks away). Fortunately, the dining room was well enough lit to let me read while I waited for my meals; the book which kept me company was Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything. I enjoyed Bryson’s wandering around cosmology, evolution, and other scientfic topics nearly as much as I’d liked his Notes from a Small Island, and considerably more than I’m a Stranger Here Myself, which, as a collection of columns, was less consistent than the other books of his that I’ve read.

I was sufficiently busy throughout my stay in Finland that I didn’t finish the Bryson until the end of my flight to Frankfurt. So I started Neil Gaiman’s American Gods partway across the Atlantic. I’d been meaning to read it for quite a while, probably ever since I saw it win the Hugo at ConJosé, but I knew I’d need a concentrated chunk of time, and the flight seemed like the perfect opportunity. I’m not sure I got out of my chair after starting the book — and, even though I was exhausted when I got home, I continued reading it, and finished it on Sunday. It’s been a long time since I’ve been that intensely involved in a book or had finished a long novel so quickly. I strongly recommend the book, and am planning to read more of his stuff soon.

I enjoyed getting back to reading SF so much that I decided to read another novel almost immediately, Ken MacLeod’s Cosmonaut Keep. I’d seen MacLeod on many panels at Interaction, where he struck me as intelligent and entertaining, so I put him on my “to read” list, and put the book in my briefcase, where it made several long trips without being opened. But I pulled it out after this trip, and started it a couple of days ago. I didn’t have quite as much free time available to read it as I might have liked, so I had to split the book over several evenings, but it was well worth the time — lots of ideas and politics, not to mention sex, drugs, and some awful lines from SF of the past. This book is the first of a series, and I’m looking forward to reading the others.

But not yet — I’ve also been getting the library at work to buy books for me (not fiction, at least not deliberately so), and it’s probably a good idea to finish them and make them available to folks on the waiting list. So the next book I plan to read is Freakonomics, which made its first trip in my briefcase on Friday night. I’m on jury duty next week, so I may have some good blocks of reading time available.

Note to my readers: if you’re expecting anything profound, read some other posting.

I managed to stay awake, if not entirely coherent, until a normal bedtime on Saturday night. But when I finally did go to sleep, I slept well and for a long time — Diane convinced me to get out of bed fairly late on Sunday morning.

I’d gained weight in Finland (no surprise there!), and so I knew I needed to start working it off. So I went to the JCC and managed to do a reasonable time on the treadmill, but I gave up after only a few weight machines.

The rest of the day passed uneventfully.

Monday, it was back to work; I’d been keeping up on my e-mails, so I didn’t have the inbox from hell to worry about, but I did have to get back to work on my projects. There was one break, though — one of my colleagues celebrated his 40th anniversary at IBM, so there was coffee and cake and a good time (the caffeine was welcome, but I probably should have skipped the cake).

I like to go to the JCC on Tuesday mornings, but that wasn’t possible this week; I had an early call, and then a colleague from Phoenix was in town. We had collaborated on some articles last year, and needed to decide what kind of follow-on activity we might undertake, so we’d blocked out the entire morning to make BIG PROGRESS. After some discussion and serious thought, we decided that neither of us could commit to a major activity at this time, so I erased the workplan from my whiteboard (it’s saved in my mail, anyway). That was BIG PROGRESS, though not quite what we’d expected when we scheduled the meeting.

Yesterday, I took advantage of technology and handled my first call of the day while waiting for the 5,000 mile service for Diane’s Prius; I had hoped to do that on Monday, but every time I called the dealer, they told me that there was a 90-minute or longer wait for the “Express Lube”, which didn’t seem very express to me! Wednesday morning was a much better time to go; I think the whole process took less than an hour (I’m not sure, because I was on the phone for most of the time).

Then I drove home to meet the insurance inspector — he was there to look at the roof damage we took on New Year’s Day. In the meantime, I’ve gotten estimates from three roofers (they vary widely, so I need to be sure that they’re all specifying the same work), and we’ll get the process started next week. Fortunately, the tarpaper stayed intact, so we don’t have to take urgent action.

Today, I did manage to hit the JCC first thing, and then it was a full day of fun, excitement, and meetings. I took advantage of my time on the treadmill to finish listening to the “Getting Things Done…Fast” CDs that a colleague had lent me; I found them helpful, but they wouldn’t have been nearly as useful if I hadn’t already read the GTD book. I am a long way from being a black belt, but my inbox is empty, and that’s a start. I need to get up the courage and initiative to tackle the home office next — there are dozens of projects waiting to be defined!

Today was the third and last day of the DBE review. I am happy to have spent the whole day inside (the high temperature today has been -21C (-5F), and the sun set about an hour ago), but it’s been a very long day. We’ve just (at 4:50pm) finished the presentation which was supposed to have been completed at 12:30 — fortunately, the rest of the schedule was devoted to “discussion and feedback”, which got truncated. We finished the session at 6:30, though the final readout from the reviewers was delayed until 8:30, back at the hotel where most people were staying.

I joined the crowd to wait for the results — as you might guess, most of the waiting happened in the hotel bar, where I tried yet another local beer, Koff. I didn’t like it as much as Lapin Gold, but it was much better than Karjala.

After the review, the IBM team went to a local restaurant which was not in a hotel — Harald. I wasn’t hungry enough for a full meal, so I passed on the reindeer sword; instead, I had some mushroom soup and a “chicken small bread”. It was good, and I’d happily go back, preferably at an earlier hour — we left at 11:30pm local time, and that only because I insisted.

The temperature was down to -24C, so we took a taxi back to the hotel, where I called Amex and switched my flight home to be Saturday instead of Sunday. I’ll still do some sightseeing in Tampere on Friday, and probably get to Helsinki early enough to see some more of the city, but there will be other trips, possibly even in warmer weather, and a week away from home seems long enough for this round.

Many years ago, I used to go to filk sessions at conventions — I still vividly remember one session at the first Westercon we went to at the Sheraton Palace in San Francisco, when we were moved out of the hallway and into the ladies’ lounge (which shocked a few mundanes who wanted to actually use the restroom). I’ve forgotten most of the filk songs from that era, but I’ve suddenly been reminded of the old classic, “If it tastes like cardboard, it must be skiffy”, sung to the tune of “Shine On Harvest Moon”:

Cylons, Cylons carve up moons Out of the sky. They killed all the colonists on Aries, Sagittarius, and both Gemini. Microns aren’t as small As microns used to be. Oh, Cylons, sigh along with me For you and your show.

Why do I mention this song now, you may ask? It’s because I’ve noticed that the connection from this meeting is in the sci.fi domain, which I find enormously amusing.

Oh, yeah, and Battlestar Galactica has been revived. Fortunately, it’s better this time around.